CMMI

Capability Maturity Model® Integration (CMMI) is a process improvement approach that provides organizations with the essential elements of effective processes that ultimately improve their performance. It can be used to guide process improvement across a project, a division, or an entire organization. CMMI integrates traditionally separate organizational functions, establishes process improvement goals and priorities, provides guidance for quality processes, and provides a point of reference for appraising current processes.*

Benefits

CMMI provides the following benefits:

• Guidance for efficient, effective improvement across multiple process disciplines in an organization.
• Improvements to best practices incorporated from earlier models.
• A common, integrated vision of improvements for all elements of an organization.

CMMI best practices enable organizations to do the following:

• More explicitly link management and engineering activities to their business objectives.
• Expand the scope and visibility into product lifecycle and engineering activities to ensure that the product or service meets customer expectations.
• Incorporate lessons learned from additional areas of best practice (e.g., measurement, risk management, and supplier management)
• Implement more robust high-maturity practices
• Address additional organizational functions critical to the company’s products and services
• More fully comply with relevant ISO standards*

The Challenge

Most companies are currently seeking to improve their business process in order to improve productivity and cut costs. That is why they turn to CMMI for help implementing its best practices in business process improvement. However, the CMMI approach does not say exactly “how” to achieve this, which allows each company to create its own approach, based on what works best. Because there are many ways in which an organization can perform these activities, each process can (and should) be unique to each individual company. SoftExpert empowers people to effectively manage end-to-end process optimization, it supports all elements of the process lifecycle - from discovery and definition, to modeling, simulation, deployment, execution, monitoring and analysis to continuous process improvement.

Ensuring effective and timely stakeholder communication and process institutionalization across geographically diverse locations can also be a challenge for organizations implementing CMMI. SoftExpert Excellent Suite is 100% Web-based, meaning that stakeholders can easily and securely access all required information and perform their tasks, ensuring commitment to the goal.

 

Each SoftExpert component addresses key compliance issues as shown below:

Module	CMMI Requirements
SE Process	Develop process improvement and model’s awareness. Identify gaps between actual practices and CMMI’s. Plan and implement process improvements. Define customized processes based on organization’s environment, nature of products, and industry best practices to ensure compliance against the desired level or process areas of CMMI. Institutionalize an optimizing process. Ensure processes are monitored and controlled.
SE Project	Automated initiative assignments, routing, escalation, review, and approval obtaining commitment to the plan. Estimate initial project time, costs, and deliverables. Identify, document, review, and approve all project changes and modifications. Ensure critical path assessment. Provide WBS & Milestone plan. Keep record of all project meetings. Coordinate and collaborate with key stakeholders. Quantitatively manage projects. Ensure project tasks are performed and verified.
SE Performance	Automates the establishment, management and communication of the corporate strategic plan. Enables the company to actively monitor current performance against goals previously defined, and report this performance to auditors and internal stakeholders in real-time. Report easy, intuitive, and flexible key performance indicator. Traffic light indicators display real-time progress. Provides a complete strategic planning (vision, mission, values, strategies, key success factors). Supports analysis tools (SWOT and decision matrix).
SE Risk	Risk framework can easily be configured to a variety of organizational structures or methodologies, enabling organizations to adapt the solution to their unique systems and processes. Supports a top-down risk assessment approach and a process level risk assessment approach. Risks, controls, and tests are linked for traceability. Automate the tracking of inherent, target and residual risks. Identifies and scores risks based upon significance and likelihood, and track controls related to each risk. Provides a framework for establishing risk management goals and priorities, identifying action plans and ownership, and monitoring progress against goals. Robust reporting features such as dashboards, heat maps and key risk indicators enabling executive monitoring of critical risks.
SE Document	Manage the creation, review, approval, and distribution of documents. Document the Quality Management System. Prevent unintended use of incorrect documents. Automate document protection and retention rules. Enterprise-wide involvement in the process of document changes. Ensure only the latest document versions are used.
SE Action	Manage corrective actions throughout the project. Identify, register, and correct problem causes. Keep records of defects, the investigation of their cause, and the corrective actions. Assess effectiveness of corrective actions. Formalize review and disposition of nonconforming processes. Ensure that appropriate corrective action is decided upon and implemented. Ensure that responsibility for corrective action is clearly defined. Keep records of all complaints and follow-up actions. Correct any deficiencies before they can cause defects in products or processes.
SE Audit	Audits are planned and performed. Communicated to stakeholders results of audits. Correct and register all findings. Manage any required corrective action. Ensure corrective actions are carried out on time.
SE Competence	Identify training needs. Keep records of all trainings. Ensure staff performance are regularly appraised and recorded. Ensure lack of skills and qualifications are found. Ensure qualified individuals are assigned to proper tasks. Ensure that your personnel have: The right experience. The right education. The right training. The right skills. Define acceptable levels of competence. Identify your training and awareness needs. Establish training needs assessment procedures. Deliver your training and awareness programs. Evaluate effectiveness of training and awareness. Maintain records of competence.
SE BI	Provide graphical scorecards and dashboards display. Provide status with standard one-click reports. Create custom scorecards, dashboards, and reports.

* http://www.sei.cmu.edu